Moscow at night (Credit: Evgenit/Pixabay)
Apple has caved to pressure from Russian authorities and removed a number of the best iPhone VPN apps from the App Store in the country.
Reportedly, VPN usage increased dramatically in Russia following the start of the war with Ukraine. At that point, Russian authorities blocked access to a number of Western social media sites.
Virtual Private Networks are intended to encrypt a user’s data for security reasons, but they have the added benefit that they disguise where a user is. So, using one of the services, location can’t be tracked by the government. Once set up on an iPhone, the user can therefore bypass local — on in this case, country-wide — restrictions on sites.
